While most teenagers are bragging about their cell phones, MP3 players and other gadgets, 16-year-old Courtney Van Goethem of Kewaunee [Wisconsin] is most proud of a letter she received from a 100-year-old Dutch woman.

The letter, written by Miep Gies, came in April and was in response to Van Goethem's own handwritten inquiry. Gies helped hide Anne Frank's family, as well as another family and a dentist, for two years during World War II. After the Franks were captured by the Nazis, she found 15-year-old Anne's diary and, years later, helped get it published into the renowned book, "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Last year, as a freshman at Manitowoc Roncalli High School, Van Goethem and her peers were assigned to read the book in their world cultures class. Van Goethem became immersed in Frank's writings....

When Van Goethem's teacher, Andy Berkhout, told the class that Gies still was alive and living in Amsterdam, she immediately wanted to reach out to the woman....

With Berkhout's help, Van Goethem tracked Gies down through the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C. She then wrote a letter asking those questions. Then she waited.

Four months later, Van Goethem was paged to come to the high school office. When she got there, a letter from Gies was waiting for her....

Gies died on Jan. 11, making Van Goethem's letter from the woman even more historically significant, Berkhout said....

Scientists seeking permission to exhume the remains of Leonardo da Vinci plan to reconstruct his face to discover whether his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is a disguised self-portrait.

A team from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, has asked to open the tomb in which the Renaissance painter and polymath is believed to lie at Amboise castle, in the Loire valley, where he died in 1519, aged 67.

The identity of the Mona Lisa has been debated for centuries, with speculation ranging from Leonardo’s mother to Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant.

Some scholars have suggested that Leonardo’s presumed homosexuality and love of riddles led him to paint himself as a woman.

Recreating Leonardo’s face could test the theory of Lillian Schwartz, an American expert who drew on computer studies to highlight apparent similarities between the features of the Mona Lisa and those of a self-portrait by the artist.

A multi-million dollar collection of forged art seized by police went on public display for the first time Saturday.

The exhibition, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), featured more than 100 fake works from Lowry paintings to Barbara Hepworth sculptures.

Some forgers inserted letters, invoices and other documents into archives to invent a history for their work to make it appear authentic.

The DiMenna Children’s History Museum, as it will be known, is part of the $60 million renovation of the historical society building on Central Park West, Louise Mirrer, the president and chief economic officer of the museum, said this week. The roughly 4,000-square-foot museum has been designed by Lee H. Skolnick Architecture & Design Partnership with a $5 million donation from Joseph A. and Diana DiMenna.

The new museum will focus on the stories of children, from famous figures like Alexander Hamilton, who came to New York as a teenage orphan to attend college, to the boys and girls who hawked newspapers on city streets 100 years ago.

The mini-museum’s artifacts, some of them never exhibited before, will be drawn from the historical society’s vast collections, said Valerie Paley, the society’s historian for special projects. Aimed at roughly a fourth-grade level, the information in the exhibits will nevertheless be intended to appeal to all ages, she said, adding that educators helped select a diverse group of historical figures to illuminate different aspects of history.

Though the number of children’s museums around the country has grown tremendously in recent decades — there were 243 of them in 2007, with another 78 in the planning stages, according to one study, compared with 38 in 1975 — the DiMenna museum will be one of very few history museums for children. Since becoming president in 2004, Ms. Mirrer has sought a new prominence for the historical society, and the children’s museum is part of that effort.

It's no secret in Germany that there are tens of thousands of former informants for the East German secret police still around. After all, over the lifetime of the communist German state, more than 100,000 people provided information to the so-called Stasi on either an official or unofficial basis.


Concern remains high, however, that some of those who collaborated with the Stasi have ended up in positions of political influence. And on Thursday, the parliament for the German state of Brandenburg passed a law requiring all members of state parliament be checked for possible collaboration with the communist spies.

The law was a long time in coming. Brandenburg is the last of the five former East German states to enact such a regulation -- and it was only passed due to a series of revelations last fall that several members of the state parliament had cooperated with the Stasi prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"It is about time that the state parliament addresses this question," said parliamentarian Linda Teuteberg, a member of the business-friendly Free Democrats, in response to the vote.

The German case against Videla, whom Argentina refused to extradite in 2007, stems from the reopening in December of an investigation into the disappearance of a German citizen identified by German media as Rolf Stawowiok.

Some of Stawowiok’s remains were recently exhumed in Argentina, providing forensic evidence that he had been shot during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War of the late 1970s.

A spokesman for prosecutors in the city of Nuremberg, Thomas Koch, said the new arrest warrant on suspicion of murder was also a call to other nations to apprehend Videla, should he step outside Argentina.

“The remains of one individual have been identified and we know that this person was murdered, which is why we should pick up the investigation once again,” Koch said.

Charges against 9/11 suspects were dropped "without prejudice" -- a procedural move that allows federal officials to transfer the men to trial in a civilian court and also leaves the door open to again bringing charges in military commissions.

Currently no suspects stand charged in the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11. U.S. officials sent notification to Congress and families of 9/11 victims Friday afternoon.

The Obama administration decided in November to remove the five suspects -- including self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- from a military trial after $100 million was spent on their prosecution and on construction of a state-of-the-art courthouse at Guantanamo Bay specifically to facilitate their military commissions.

Use of the word Negro to describe a black person has largely fallen out of polite conversation — except on the U.S. Census questionnaire. There, under "What is this person's race?" is an option that reads, "Black, African Am., or Negro." That has raised the ire of certain black activists and politicians as the Census Bureau gears up to mail out its once-a-decade questionnaires. The controversy has been cast by many as an instance of a tone-deaf agency not keeping up with the times. In actuality, the flash point represents a much larger theme: the often contentious way the Census both reflects and forges our evolving understanding of race.

The immediate reason the word Negro is on the Census is simple enough: in the 2000 Census, more than 56,000 people wrote in Negro to describe their identity — even though it was already on the form. Some people, it seems, still strongly identify with the term, which used to be a perfectly polite designation. To blindly delete it is to risk incorrectly counting the unknown number of (presumably older) black Americans who checked the "black" box precisely because Negro was included.

But the Census Bureau is aware that times are changing — and not just when it comes to the word Negro. As part of the 2010 Census, the bureau will test 15 major changes to questions about race and Hispanic origin. For each, approximately 30,000 households will receive a slightly different questionnaire so that demographers and statisticians can use data — along with follow-up interviews — to decide if the modification helps or hurts the accuracy and consistency of information collected. "We hope this will help us better understand the way people identify with these concepts," says Nicholas Jones, chief of the Census' racial-statistics branch. One change being tested: deleting the word Negro. Others include combining queries about Hispanic origin and race into one question and getting rid of the word race in the question altogether.

Those modifications could have a lasting impact on how Americans think about race. Census data underpin broad stretches of society, from federal regulations to corporate marketing strategies, and how data are framed when collected speaks to our collective worldview (both contemporary and historical). Consider that in a 2006 study of 138 censuses from around the world, New York University sociologist Ann Morning found that only 15% of those asking about ancestry or national origin used the term race. Almost all of those that did were former slave economies....

Hitler's Gestapo arrested thousands of women for admitting they had affairs with foreign forced laborers in Germany, despite many confessions being false and made under duress. Men were often executed and women sent to concentration camps for the crime of "racial defilement." Some continued to suffer the consequences long after the end of the war.

On Sept. 19, 1941, Maria K. signed the record of her interrogation. In her written statement to the police detective, the 14-year-old girl confessed that she had "shared the bed of Polish national Florian Sp. and also had sexual relations with him."

The incident allegedly took place on a Saturday evening in July. She had tended the cows during the day, and that evening she and her 18-year-old friend Hedwig invited the two Polish men to join them.

According to her signed statement, they kissed, and then the four of them went to the bedroom, Hedwig with Josef G. and she with Florian. Once in the bedroom, the Polish man removed her panties. They had slex three times that evening and twice in the next few days, once after lunch, behind a bush in a nearby field. This is the account given in her signed confession.

Maria K., who is 82 today, covers her face with her hands when she talks about the "confession" that changed her life forever and led to the death of the two young men. She is ashamed, even though the Gestapo detective concocted the statement and beat her into signing it. This is her story today, and other documents support its veracity.

Gisela Schwarze, a historian from the western German city of Münster, has spent years investigating cases like hers, digging through the files of special courts in cities like Dortmund, Bielefeld and Kiel. She uncovered Maria K.'s story in a local archive. It unfolded in Asbeck, a village with a wartime population of 850 in the western Münsterland region.

'Racial Defilement'

As a result of her research, Schwarze discovered a group of victims of the Nazi regime that has been neglected to this day. It consists of the women and girls who government officials accused of having sexual relations with foreign forced laborers. Some of the romantic relationships did exist, while others were made up, but the punishment was almost always extreme. The women were sent to concentration camps by the thousands, while the men were usually executed.

"Fellow Germans who engage in sexual relations with male or female civil workers of the Polish nationality, commit other immoral acts or engage in love affairs shall be arrested immediately," Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, ordered in 1940.

The crime the Nazi lawyers had constructed was called "racial defilement." At first, it only applied to relationships between Jews and non-Jews, but the racist construct was later expanded to include Slavs.

Prisoners of war and deported civilians were forced to work in factories and in fields, where they came into contact with local residents, many of them women. The men were fighting on the front. But informers prepared to denounce wrongdoers were everywhere -- neighbors, co-workers and teachers -- contributing to a hellish atmosphere of racial hatred and bigotry.

Maria K., the third youngest of 11 siblings, was orphaned as a child. An older brother took in the siblings, but he was eventually drafted into the German army, and his 27-year-old wife was left to care for the children on her own. To help her out, the landlord sent Florian Sp., a young Polish forced laborer, whom the children quickly came to trust.

'Necessary Welfare Measures'

The comfortable relationship between the Polish worker and the family was viewed with suspicion in the village. Maria was arrested, and during her interrogation the Gestapo officer hit her in the face and told her to admit that she had had sex with the Pole. The helpless and naïve girl signed the confession, which only marked the beginning of her worst ordeals. In October 1941, the Gestapo in Münster submitted a request to "initiate the necessary welfare measures" against Maria, who was now classified as a "dishonorable German girl."

She was placed in various reformatories and was eventually taken to a place that the SS had set up to house young female delinquents: the "Uckermark Youth Protection Camp," a subcamp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

She was given a prisoner number, 290, and from then on she no longer had a name. She suffered beatings, whippings, hunger and acts of humiliation. She was released in the fall of 1944 and taken to a preparatory school for children's nurses near Berlin. At the end of 1945, she managed to return to Asbeck by traveling through occupied Germany. The two Polish forced laborers had already been hung in Asbeck on August 28, 1942. The cause of death listed on their death certificates was "unknown."

The people who carried most of these executions remained unpunished after the war, and in 1963 the Münster public prosecutor's office closed its investigations into the cases. But the humiliations continued for Maria K. During church services, villagers berated her as a "Pole's whore" and "Pole lover." Many women who had survived the Nazi persecution were treated in much the same way.

A few weeks ago, Maria K. and historian Schwarze traveled to the Uckermark camp together, where a memorial, a stone wrapped in strips of iron, stands today. Maria K. scattered a handful of earth at the site, which she had collected in the forest where the two young Poles were killed.

The plan to change the title of The Beaver after 90 years to avoid online porn blockers has made Canada's top history magazine an international media sensation — first as joke fodder for Jay Leno and now as the subject of an editorial printed Thursday in another venerable publication: the British-based newsweekly The Economist.

"The Beaver website was attracting (albeit briefly) readers who had little interest in Samuel de Champlain's astrolabe or what Prairie settlers ate for breakfast," the editorial dryly observed, before concluding that the "dull" new name — "Canada's History" — was necessary to help storytelling about this country's past escape "Internet obscenity filters" and crude references to "female pubic hair."

The Economist, not above a naughty pun itself, ran a picture of the tree-chomping rodent alongside its editorial, with the caption: "No, it's not a pussy."

Late-night TV host Leno also cracked wise earlier this week about The Beaver, suggesting the magazine has been a hot seller among young Canadian men who were, however, very "disappointed when they got it home."

It's a publicity blitz that any company rebranding itself would crave, but the attention generated by the Winnipeg magazine's makeover has also prompted criticism from some subscribers about the banality of the new name, and made the country's bucktoothed national symbol a global laughingstock — or, perhaps, even more of a global laughing stock.

"It definitely has drawn a whole lot of international attention that we didn't anticipate," said Deborah Morrison, president of Canada's National History Society and publisher of The Beaver. "As one person who tweeted us said: 'I just saw you on Jay Leno. The bad news is that he told a joke about you; the good news is that I'd never heard of you before and I'm really interested.' That kind of sums it up."

The reason behind the magazine's name change, first reported last week by Canwest News Service, has generated headlines across Canada and in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.

Morrison said the media frenzy has "tripled our traffic" to the history society's website.

The organization, which also publishes a children's magazine called Kayak and runs a host of educational programs, is working at "capitalizing on the opportunity" the renaming has generated, said Morrison.

History-minded communities in countries where the story has made a splash are being targeted for an online subscription campaign, and the media attention in the U.S. has coincided with an expansion of the magazine's newsstand distribution south of the border.

The challenge, she added, is "getting beyond the humour of it" to attract new readers while reassuring traditional subscribers that "we are not fundamentally changing the nature of the magazine."

Morrison said the publication's new name — despite complaints from some commentators and society members that it's too boring — is not negotiable.

"It's obviously a good name for a Canadian history magazine — it says what it is. I know that is, perhaps, anticlimactic after all of this international attention to the name we had, but it will make it a lot clearer for people to know what we are."

She added: "It's the logical, best alternative if we couldn't be The Beaver anymore."

The Beaver, Canada's second-oldest magazine, was launched in October 1920 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Hudson's Bay Company, which sponsored the publication until it was transferred to the history society in 1994.

After decades of devoting almost all of its content to the history of the fur trade, the Arctic and Canada's northwest frontier, The Beaver's focus was revamped and broadened over the past 15 years to make it a pan-national clearing house for news and feature articles covering all aspects of Canadian history.

Only Maclean's, the popular weekly Canadian newsmagazine founded in 1905, is older than The Beaver.

One of its bloggers, Colby Cosh, suggested this week that The Beaver's forced renaming to "Canada's History" is symptomatic of a broader, web-driven cultural trend toward stultifying literalness.

"The brand could perhaps have stood up to any amount of silent snickering," Cosh writes, "but no media organ can afford to offer confusion to search engines and spam filters now. Google is a powerful, underestimated force for prosaicness: just ask any sub-editor who's been ordered to re-do a charmingly cryptic headline and get rid of the cute irony."

The Economist made waves earlier this month by injecting its opinion into Canadian politics, calling the Conservative government's proroguing of Parliament a democracy-damaging "prime-ministerial whim."

Ten of the pioneering photos of snowflake crystals US farmer Wilson A Bentley began taking more than a century ago are to be sold in New York.

Bentley (1865-1931) is credited with capturing the first images of single snowflakes on camera. He made thousands of the jewel-like prints, no two alike.

His photomicrography technique involved a microscope and a bellows camera.

He caught pneumonia in a blizzard and died just weeks after the publication of his book Snow Crystals.

The sale of his crystal images is a rare event, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Chicago art gallery owner Carl Hammer is selling them along with 16 of Bentley's winter scenes at an antiques show at New York's American Folk Art Museum.

"They're remarkably beautiful," said Mr Hammer.

"There are imperfections on the outer edges of the image itself and on the paper, but the images themselves are quite spectacular."

'Good for 100 years'

Snowflake expert Kenneth G Libbrecht said the photos did not meet modern standards because of the "crude equipment" Bentley used.

"But he did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years," Mr Libbrecht added.

Bentley, who was known as The Snowflake Man, wrote in 1925: "Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others.

"Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost."

Mr Libbrecht said the method of singling out a crystal to photograph had not changed.

"You basically let the crystal fall on something, black or dark-coloured, and then you have to pick it up with a toothpick or brush and put it on a glass slide," he said.

The National University of Ireland, a century-old federal institution that comprises some of the country's leading universities and colleges, including University College Dublin, is facing dissolution. Ireland's education minister, Batt O'Keeffe, announced the move on Wednesday, saying that the umbrella institution had outlived its usefulness and that "the need to have a separate body undertaking what is now a limited set of functions" no longer exists.

His announcement, which the university's registrar said in an interview today "came as a bolt out of the blue," led to a hastily convened meeting of the university's senate this afternoon. In a statement released after that session, the group "expressed regret at the minister's decision and in particular at the lack of consultation with the chancellor or with the presidents of the constituent universities before yesterday's announcement of the decision."

The National University of Ireland was established in 1908 and now consists of four universities and six colleges. At the outset, the university held real authority to grant degrees and recognize courses, but its member institutions became largely autonomous and self-governing. In an increasingly competitive higher-education landscape, those institutions have also come to place greater emphasis on their individual identities and collegiate brands....

The education minister's move to abolish the university is based on a recommendation in a report prepared last year for the government by Colm McCarthy, an economics lecturer at University College Dublin. Reached by telephone today, Mr. McCarthy said that, over time, the university had become little more than a "ceremonial unit."....

The effort to help Haiti recover from its devastating earthquake can draw on lessons learned in other large-scale tragedies, particularly the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed at least 230,000 people across a dozen countries, rescue officials say.

The same scenes of bodies littering the ground or stacked along roadways in Haiti are flashbacks to the tsunami devastation, but Bakri Beck, who headed relief activities in Indonesia's devastated Banda Aceh province — where 167,000 people died from the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami — said saving survivors must remain the priority.

During the tsunami, initial fears ran high over potential violence erupting in Banda Aceh with three decades of fighting between government forces and separatist rebels. But those worries quickly dissipated after foreign aid agencies were greeted by a peaceful mood, with victims bonding together.

Usama bin Laden is worth more to the United States alive than dead because his death could unleash "very, very nasty" attacks by militants, his son Omar Ossama bin Laden claims.

In an at times rambling interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which was conducted in part in a Damascus strip club, the terror leader's fourth eldest son said his father had already won the war on terror because he had achieved his aim of humbling the United States, and would probably not feel the need to launch more big attacks.

However he said Barack Obama's decision to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan was a big mistake that would damage the U.S. economy.

A project whose aim is identify important natural and cultural places and preserve and protect Native American sites and cultural resources throughout the Southeast is hoping to see restored a section of streambank in Macon County where there once stood a Cherokee village called Tassee.

Some artifacts such as pottery shards have already been found at the Tassee site, which lies at the confluence of the Little Tennessee and Cullasaja rivers near the soccer fields along the Greenway.

However, the streambanks along this section of river have been severely eroded and need to be stabilized.

The nonprofit Native American Cultural Sites Preservation Project, which has done work throughout Western North Carolina and Northeast Georgia, first identified the site about a year ago, according to Bill Evans with the cultural sites project. They are looking to create awareness of the need to have the streambank repaired.

Evans said the concern is that they could lose the cultural resources at the site.

They have already discovered pottery shards sticking out of the riverbanks and an archaeological survey may need to be conducted at Tassee, he said.

The streambank erosion problems started here in 2004 when torrential rains from Hurricane Ivan washed out the bank here.

"It needs to be fixed," said county commissioner Bob Simpson during a recent site visit with Evans.

At one area of the site, the bank has been completely washed out. The damage can be repaired, but the quandary is whether funding can be found to repair it.

The Tassee site is on county-owned land, but according to Simpson, anything that is done there must go through the state's Clean Water Management Trust Fund because it is within the 50-foot stream buffer.

So if it was a typical budget year in better economic times it is conceivable work could hypothetically be done through Macon Soil and Water Conservation by way of Clean Water Management Trust Fund dollars.

However, this has been anything but a typical budget year.

Mike Breedlove with Macon County Soil and Water Conservation said he has been approached by Evans about repairing the site, but the issue is funding.

"We don't have the money to do anything right now," Breedlove said. "That's the stumbling block."

Breedlove said they had been promised $420,000 (a three-year grant) from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund this year, but the funding was frozen by Gov. Bev Perdue.

They had done work on this section of stream before 2004, but Hurricane Ivan blew out the bank and the problems here have worsened over time.

He said they have done some streambank stabilization work on this section of river where they can, including live tree revetments, but they have not been able to use much rock riprap to protect against erosion due to the high cost.

They have an engineer coming in the next week or so to examine the site and help determine how much funding would be needed. "We've got the ball rolling, but it's just the money," Breedlove said.

On Jan. 28, Evans, along with representatives of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, state archaeologist Linda Hall, Breedlove, and others will meet at Tassee to further evaluate the site.

A man accused of looting thousands of artifacts, including human bone fragments, from an Illinois national wildlife refuge has been sentenced to a month in jail and five years of probation as caretakers work out what to do with the prehistoric trove.

A federal judge this week also ordered 50-year-old Leslie Jones of Creal Springs, Ill., to perform 500 hours of community service after his 30-day jail term and pay the Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge in southern Illinois more than $150,000 in restitution.

Jones pleaded guilty last October to excavation, removal or damage of archaeological resources without a permit -- a count that was punishable by up to two years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

At that time, Jones admitted he had sold some of the artifacts he unearthed at the refuge from 2004 through February 2007 to collectors and dealers.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says more than 13,000 artifacts -- including pottery, clay figures, stone weapons and tools, and more than 200 pieces of human skeletal remains dating from roughly 6000 B.C. to 400 A.D. -- were seized by investigators from Jones' home in early 2007.

Court records do not detail how many artifacts Jones may have peddled or exactly how much he profited; an investigator, the service's Geoff Donaldson, said Wednesday that prices for such historical pieces vary wildly according to the type of artifact, its condition and time period.

"We can't put a price tag on the damage he's caused," Donaldson said. "It's unfortunate because we've lost a resource. But sentencing aside, our biggest win out of this was that he was hit fairly significantly by the justice system, and hopefully he'll think twice before coming out (again) with a shovel and start digging for artifacts."

Jones had done his homework before looting the refuge, later telling investigators his research enabled him to identify pieces of artifacts and their time periods, Donaldson said.

"We considered him to be educated, particularly in the area of archaeology," Donaldson said. "He knew what he was doing."

Jones' federal public defender declined to publicly discuss the case Wednesday.

Donaldson said investigators were trying to figure out the next stop for the artifacts, which have been sorted and bagged according to their type and time period. More than 200 of the pieces are fragmented human bones.

"We're just going to have to find a home for all this stuff," most likely at educational venues and museums, he said.